A relatively recent advance in the field of battery cells, and most significantly in the field of secondary battery cells, i.e., cells which can be discharged and electrically re-charged through numerous cycles without substantial injury thereto, has been the development of alkali metal-sulfur batteries. That type of battery is described in such United States patents as U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,404,035, 3,476,602, and 3,829,331.
Those battery cells can be generally described as consisting of three elements: a liquid anode, a liquid or paste cathode, and an electrolyte-separator or membrane. Commonly, the anode is composed of a melt of one or more alkali metals, alkali metal amalgams, or alkali metal alloys. The cathode consists of sulfur, at least some of which is in the molten state, and which contains cations of the alkali metal dispersed therein. The cations in the cathode are frequently accompanied by a substantially equivalent proportion of anions that may be derived from the cathode material. The membrane, which has customarily been fabricated from glass or beta-alumina ceramics, must be selectively permeable to the cations of the alkali metal and acts to separate the anode and cathode compartments. The membrane has been further characterized as having the capability of transmitting ions of the anode metal between the anode and cathode compartments, but being relatively impermeable to, and non-transmitting of, molecules of the anode metal, electrons, and ions or molecular species of the cathode. After properly positioning the anode, cathode, and electrolyte-separator within a liquid and vapor tight case, the battery unit is completed by connecting electrically-conducting leads to the anode and cathode. The structure of such batteries has been described in, for example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,404,035 and 3,476,602. Numerous glass compositions have been investigated to serve as the electrolyte-separator, the most successful being Na.sub.2 O-containing, essentially SiO.sub.2 -free glasses, such as are illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 3,829,331.
Whereas the bulk of the previous research effort has involved the use of a liquid sodium metal anode and a liquid sulfur-sodium sulfide mixture as the cathode, more recently, considerable interest has been generated in developing a similar type battery unit but wherein liquid lithium would replace liquid sodium as the anode and a liquid sulfur-lithium sulfide mixture would constitute the cathode. Such a battery possesses the practical advantage of lower operating temperatures than the sodium battery. In short, the operating mechanism of the battery is similar to that of the liquid sodium-sulfur battery, but lithium rather than sodium comprises the alkali metal component.